The personal journals of one of postwar America’s most influential photographers, published for the first timeOne of the most significant unpublished texts in the history of photography, Memorable Fancies is the daybooks of Minor White, an artist who played a leading role in shaping the practice of photography in postwar America. Begun in the early 1930s and taking its name from a series of dialogues in William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

A critical look at the competing motivations behind one of modern architecture’s most widely known and misunderstood movementsAlthough “mid-century modern” has evolved into a highly popular and ubiquitous architectural style, this term obscures the varied perspectives and approaches of its original practitioners. In Nothing Permanent, Todd Cronan displaces generalizations with a nuanced intellectual history of architectural innovation in California between...

Red Aesthetics offers a new way to think about art and politics, focusing on the revolutionary work of Aleksandr Rodchenko, Bertolt Brecht, and Sergei Eisenstein between the wars. Todd Cronan shows how these three artists’ photographs, dramas, films, and writings—centered on class conflict—differ from current left orthodoxies rooted in empathy. Writing against liberal pieties, Cronan contends, following Brecht, that empathy is not the solution to our problems, but more like the source of t...

This is the definitive guide to writing engagingly about the art of our time. Invaluable for students, arts professionals and other writers, it brims with practical tips that range across the full spectrum of art-writing including academic essays; press releases and news articles; texts for auction and exhibition catalogues, gallery guides and wall labels; op-ed journalism and exhibition reviews and writing for websites and blogs. Gilda Williams, a London correspondent for Artforum, points...

Lessons, demonstrations, definitions, and tips on what to expect in art school, what it means to make art, and how to think like an artist.What is the first thing to learn in art school? “Art can be anything.” The second thing? “Learn to draw.” With 101 Things to Learn in Art School, artist and teacher Kit White delivers and develops such lessons, striking an instructive balance between technical advice and sage concepts. These 101 maxims, meditations, and...

As public interest in modern art continues to grow, as witnessed by the spectacular success of Tate Modern and the Bilbao Guggenheim, there is a real need for a book that will engage general readers, offering them not only information and ideas about modern art, but also explaining its contemporary relevance and history. This book achieves all this and focuses on interrogating the idea of 'modern' art by asking such questions as: What has made a work of art qualify as modern (or f...

Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror.Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Ranci�re, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated t...

A "smart and fascinating" reassessment of postwar American culture and the politics of the 1960s from the author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture ( Reason Magazine).We tend to think of the sixties as an explosion of creative energy and freedom that arose in direct revolt against the social restraint and authoritarian hierarchy of the early Cold War years. Yet, as Fred Turner reveals in The Democratic Surround, the decades that brough...

Hal Foster, author of the acclaimed Design and Crime, argues that a fusion of architecture and art is a defining feature of contemporary culture. He identifies a "global style" of architecture-as practiced by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano-analogous to the international style of Le Corbusier, Gropius and Mies.More than any art, today's global style conveys both the dreams and delusions of modernity. Foster demonstrates that a study of the "art-architecture co...

The architect Alvar Aalto once argued that what mattered in architecture was not what a building ‘looks like’ on the day it opens, but what it ‘is like’ to live in thirty years later. In this book Robert McCarter presents a persuasive defence of why and how interior spatial experience is the necessary starting point for design, and why the quality of that experience is the only appropriate means of evaluating a work of architecture after it is built.The Space Within explore...

Contemporary art can be baffling and beautiful, provocative and disturbing. This pioneering book presents a new look at the controversial period between 1945 and 2015, when art and its traditional forms were called into question. It focuses on the relationship between American and European art, and challenges previously held views about the origins of some of the most innovative ideas in art of this time. Major artists such as Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys...

From the pencil to the puppet to the drone—the humanities and the social sciences continue to ride a wave of interest in material culture and the world of things. How should we understand the force and figure of that wave as it shapes different disciplines? Other Things explores this question by considering a wide assortment of objects—from beach glass to cell phones, sneakers to skyscrapers—that have fascinated a range of writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, Man Ray, Sp...